{"id":13890,"date":"2024-10-01T01:10:04","date_gmt":"2024-10-01T01:10:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=13890"},"modified":"2024-10-01T01:26:31","modified_gmt":"2024-10-01T01:26:31","slug":"robert-downey-jr-is-a-novelist-with-a-novel-muse-in-mcneal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=13890","title":{"rendered":"Robert Downey Jr. Is a Novelist With a Novel Muse in \u2018McNeal\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The \u201cOppenheimer\u201d star makes his Broadway debut in Ayad Akhtar\u2019s timely new play about a literary lion who gets assistance from A.I.<\/p>\n

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The Vivian Beaumont Theater has, over the years, been memorably transformed into many specific, even exotic, locales: a Maine carousel, a Thai palace, a South Pacific Seabee base. But never has it looked more exotically nowhere than it does right now, as the setting for Ayad Akhtar\u2019s \u201cMcNeal,\u201d<\/a> a thought experiment about art and A.I. With its softly rounded edges, cool colors and shifting screens, the sleek, vast space is as much an Apple store as a stage.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s only fitting for a story, set in \u201cthe very near future,\u201d in which computer-mediated interactions \u2014 predictive chatbots, large language models, generative intelligence \u2014 are pitted against their analog forebears. What creative opportunities does such technology afford the artist? What human opportunities does it squander? Forget the sword: It\u2019s the pen vs. the pixel.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m afraid, alas, the pixel wins, because the play, which opened on Monday, in a stylish Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, works only as provocation. Timely but turgid, it rarely rises to drama; in a neat recapitulation of current fears about technology, its humans, hardly credible as such, have been almost entirely replaced by ideas.<\/p>\n

Certainly Jacob McNeal, played by the formidable Robert Downey Jr., is more a data set than a character. A manly, hard-driving literary novelist of the old school, like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, he is not at all the magnetic and personable man Akhtar describes in the script; rather, he is whiny, entitled and fatuous. (\u201cAt my simple best, I\u2019m a poet,\u201d he says.) About the only time he engages instead of repels is when, in the amusing opening scene, as his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) prepares to deliver bad news, he fails to get ChatGPT to tell him his chances of winning the Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI hope this was helpful,\u201d the bot types.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was not, you soulless, silicon suck-up,\u201d he replies.<\/p>\n

We are meant to understand that McNeal is a man who wears his awfulness, in this case his vanity, as an adorable idiosyncrasy, as if it were a feathered hat. He flirts and philanders with equal obliviousness to moral implications. He aggressively asserts his anti-woke bona fides. While being interviewed by a New York Times journalist, who is Black, he asks if she was a \u201cdiversity hire.\u201d And when she fails to take the bait, he adds, as a man of his sophistication would know enough not to, \u201cDid I say something wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Downey and Andrea Martin, who portrays a literary agent, in the new play by Ayad Akhtar.<\/span>Sara Krulwich\/The New York Times<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into<\/a>\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe<\/a>\u00a0for all of The Times.<\/p>\n

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The \u201cOppenheimer\u201d star makes his Broadway debut in Ayad Akhtar\u2019s timely new play about a literary lion who gets assistance from A.I.The Vivian Beaumont Theater has, over the years, been memorably transformed into many specific, even exotic, locales: a Maine carousel, a Thai palace, a South Pacific Seabee base. But never has it looked more exotically nowhere than it does right now, as the setting for Ayad Akhtar\u2019s \u201cMcNeal,\u201d a thought experiment about art and A.I. With its softly rounded edges, cool colors and shifting screens, the sleek, vast space is as much an Apple store as a stage.That\u2019s only fitting for a story, set in \u201cthe very near future,\u201d in which computer-mediated interactions \u2014 predictive chatbots, large language models, generative intelligence \u2014 are pitted against their analog forebears. What creative opportunities does such technology afford the artist? What human opportunities does it squander? Forget the sword: It\u2019s the pen vs. the pixel.I\u2019m afraid, alas, the pixel wins, because the play, which opened on Monday, in a stylish Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, works only as provocation. Timely but turgid, it rarely rises to drama; in a neat recapitulation of current fears about technology, its humans, hardly credible as such, have been almost entirely replaced by ideas.Certainly Jacob McNeal, played by the formidable Robert Downey Jr., is more a data set than a character. A manly, hard-driving literary novelist of the old school, like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, he is not at all the magnetic and personable man Akhtar describes in the script; rather, he is whiny, entitled and fatuous. (\u201cAt my simple best, I\u2019m a poet,\u201d he says.) About the only time he engages instead of repels is when, in the amusing opening scene, as his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) prepares to deliver bad news, he fails to get ChatGPT to tell him his chances of winning the Nobel Prize.\u201cI hope this was helpful,\u201d the bot types.\u201cIt was not, you soulless, silicon suck-up,\u201d he replies.We are meant to understand that McNeal is a man who wears his awfulness, in this case his vanity, as an adorable idiosyncrasy, as if it were a feathered hat. He flirts and philanders with equal obliviousness to moral implications. He aggressively asserts his anti-woke bona fides. While being interviewed by a New York Times journalist, who is Black, he asks if she was a \u201cdiversity hire.\u201d And when she fails to take the bait, he adds, as a man of his sophistication would know enough not to, \u201cDid I say something wrong?\u201dDowney and Andrea Martin, who portrays a literary agent, in the new play by Ayad Akhtar.Sara Krulwich\/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13892,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13890"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13893,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13890\/revisions\/13893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}